Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa doesn't agree with a proposal floated by the city's chief fiscal officer calling for eliminating government support for the arts as a way to address a $404-million budget shortfall, a top aide said Monday. Miguel Santana, the city administrative officer, suggested saving $10.7 million by doing away with the Department of Cultural Affairs as one of three options for the arts included in a wide-ranging, 219-page memo he sent to the mayor and City Council leaders on Friday with his ideas for closing the funding gap. The least drastic measure Santana offered calls for $1.3 million in savings while preserving all of the department's current functions, which include making grants to arts organizations and individual artists, partially funding community festivals, and running a network of cultural landmarks and neighborhood arts centers and theaters.

It's simple: Follow the tax money Re "Stimulus for L.A. mostly sits unspent," Dec. 26 The failure to effectively use hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money is Exhibit A in the case that as much as possible, government should function on a local level, relying on federal powers for limited areas. All tax money originates locally. But we send it to Washington, let them remove their vig and return the rest with restrictions on how it can be used. To install left-turn signals, we tax local citizens, send the money to Washington, have the city submit a proposal to get some of the money back, and have a federal committee grant it back to us and another federal agency oversee it, creating several extra steps to put a signal at Sunset and Wilcox.

The lead paragraph of The Times' Feb. 7 article, "A shifting canvas in Pasadena," states that the "city has carried out a tradition of giving back in the form of art." As the founder and artistic director of the defunct Pasadena Shakespeare Company, which performed 37 critically acclaimed productions over nine seasons, my experience is not consistent with the oft-repeated claim that Pasadena is supportive of the arts (at least in any meaningful way). Indeed, it comes as no surprise to me that the artistic canvas to which The Times refers is shifting -- or in imminent danger of sinking beneath the waves.

Los Angeles County's three biggest government-supported cultural institutions figure to reap $60 million in taxpayer funding for the coming 2009-10 fiscal year, their subsidies holding up well despite falling property values and other recession-spurred declines in tax receipts that are draining public coffers. Public libraries and county and municipal arts agencies didn't fare as well in the county budget proposal released Monday, or in the city of Los Angeles spending plan just issued by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

With the nation's nonprofit arts organizations suffering in the dismal economy, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is offering crisis consulting to see them through. The arts aren't at the top of many lawmakers' lists for a federal bailout. So Michael Kaiser, the Kennedy Center's president, announced an unprecedented "Arts in Crisis" initiative Tuesday to offer free assistance to performing arts managers across the country.

January 1, 2009 | Michael Kaiser, Kaiser is president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

While government bailouts are being offered or considered for financial institutions, the auto industry, homeowners and so many other needy and worthy sectors, one group is quickly and rather quietly falling apart: our nation's arts organizations. In the last few months, dozens of opera companies, theater companies, dance organizations, museums and symphonies have either ceased operating or suffered major cash crises.

Virginia Woolf is often depicted as a dreamy, effete snob, agonizing all day over a single adjective while sipping tea -- but her tough-minded view of art would make her right at home with the shot-and-a-beer crowd. To create art, she knew, you need more than inspiration. More than drive. More than talent. You need cash. Lots of it. Cash for things such as food and fuel, brushes and paint, shelter and shoes.

When it comes to his future arts giving in today's economy, even Eli Broad, perhaps Los Angeles' most generous arts supporter, is looking at the bottom line. "The value of the Broad Foundation is down 18%," says Broad, who can count among his latest contributions $56 million for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Broad Contemporary Art Museum, $10 million to the new Broad Stage at Santa Monica College and $6 million for Los Angeles Opera's coming production of Wagner's epic "Ring" cycle.

Unprecedented spending is the Bush administration's plan to avoid the worst or something like it in the American economy. But many arts organizations can quip that they were way ahead in the rush to embrace Mother Necessity in hopes of begetting Invention. What many of them called "the perfect storm" hit in 2001.